The Mobile Presenter

For me, Post-it notes are an important part of the preparation phase of a presentation. They're great for brainstorming and can serve as early versions of slides. Right now, I am working on a presentation that I'm about to give soon and all I have at this point is a collection of Post-it notes stuck to my whiteboard. But that's all I need to practise this talk!

Once I'm happy with the content and comfortable with the flow, I'm going to sit down at my computer and create the slides. There will probably be fewer slides than the number of Post-its I have right now; some Post-its are early versions of slides, others are simply notes.

But do you always have to use Post-its? Are there any alternative products you could use? I've mentioned software solutions before - mind mapping tools and the free Post-it app. But this is about "analogue" alternatives: Tangible things you can write on with a pen. What alternatives are there?

At a recent event with three speakers, it was good to see how all three of them tried to avoid standing behind the lectern so that they could better connect with their audience. Trying to do so provided them with new challenges, though.

According to an article that was shared a lot recently, yet another CEO decided to ban the use of PowerPoint in his company. He's not the first CEO to have that idea and he won't be the last. But, as in all the other cases, what he does is only fighting symptoms, not causes. In other words: He's blaming the tool for being used incorrectly.

I recently attended an event, an evening consisting of a series of short talks. Afterwards, it occurred to me that what I've seen could have been representative of the future of presentations, i.e. the average talk we're going to see in the future. And I have to say, the outlook isn't pretty.

On paper, the programme read a bit like a TEDx event: 12 short talks on a range of topics like innovation, management, motivation, health, etc. Content-wise, what we did get, however, were effectively 11 variations of a "you can do it!" talk plus one mildly entertaining one about sex.

It's been a little over two years since my first ebook, Presenting for Geeks, was released. I made the deliberate decision to write it in English, despite this not being my native language, in the hopes to reach a wider audience that way. I think it mostly worked out okay, thanks in no small part to my editor Anna Kent, who dutifully corrected my English and overall made it a better book with her sometimes radical but always necessary cuts.

I do get asked for a German translation from time to time, though. Until very recently, I simply didn't have the time to do it (hiring a translator was pretty much out of the question for cost reasons). Back in January, I sat down one day to see how hard it would be - and finished the translation just a few weeks later. Friends and family volunteered to proofread it and now I'm happy to announce that Präsentieren für Geeks, the German edition of Presenting for Geeks, is now available.